O.C. Jurors Weigh Fate of Avila

Alejandro Avila has shown little emotion during a monthlong trial in which he has been labeled by prosecutors as the most abhorrent of criminals: a pedophile who snatched, assaulted and suffocated a 5-year-old girl.

And his expression remained blank Wednesday morning as he watched eight men and four women file into the jury deliberation room at Orange County Superior Court to decide his fate.

Orange County Assistant Dist. Atty. David Brent, who was allowed to have the last words with the jury, used the opportunity Wednesday to remind them of the DNA evidence that he says links Avila with slaying victim Samantha Runnion. He described an image of the girl clawing at her attacker and sobbing copiously in his car.

“She, Samantha Runnion, identified her killer,” Brent said in his final address to jurors.

Scientists have testified that Avila’s DNA was found in material under her fingernails and that her genetic material -- perhaps her tears -- was in his Ford Thunderbird near the passenger door handle.

Samantha was abducted near her Stanton condominium on July 15, 2002. Her nude, battered body was found the next day at a popular hang-glider’s launch at a cliff overlooking Lake Elsinore. At the time, Avila was a factory worker and lived nearby.

If jurors convict Avila, 30, they will gather again to decide whether he will be executed.

Avila was acquitted in 2001 of molestation charges relating to two girls he had met through a former girlfriend.

One of those girls lived with her father in Samantha’s complex, and prosecutors theorized that Avila went there looking for her but couldn’t find her and took Samantha instead.

“When you’re a pedophile, you have to feed the fantasy,” Brent told jurors Wednesday. “You have to have children.”

Prosecutors say they believe Avila killed Samantha so that she could not identify him.

“Thank heavens for forensic science,” Brent told jurors. “That’s what stopped him. That’s why he’s here.”

Avila’s attorneys have denied their client’s guilt, saying law enforcement pinned the crime on the wrong person because they felt so much pressure to convict someone. Samantha’s abduction and death generated a flurry of national media coverage amid a string of other well-publicized child kidnappings.

But Brent dismissed the defense claims of shoddy evidence interpretation as “distractions.”

“It’s rank speculation,” he said. “It’s not worthy of you.”